PCRFed: personalized federated learning with contrastive representation for non-independently and identically distributed medical image segmentation

Federated learning (FL) has shown great potential in addressing data privacy issues in medical image analysis. However, varying data distributions across different sites can create challenges in aggregating client models and achieving good global model performance. In this study, we propose a novel personalized contrastive representation FL framework, named PCRFed, which leverages contrastive representation learning to address the non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) challenge and dynamically adjusts the distance between local clients and the global model to improve each client’s performance without incurring additional communication costs. The proposed weighted model-contrastive loss provides additional regularization for local models, optimizing their respective distributions while effectively utilizing information from all clients to mitigate performance challenges caused by insufficient local data. The PCRFed approach was evaluated on two non-IID medical image segmentation datasets, and the results show that it outperforms several state-of-the-art FL frameworks, achieving higher single-client performance while ensuring privacy preservation and minimal communication costs. Our PCRFed framework can be adapted to various encoder-decoder segmentation network architectures and holds significant potential for advancing the use of FL in real-world medical applications. Based on a multi-center dataset, our framework demonstrates superior overall performance and higher single-client performance, achieving a 2.63% increase in the average Dice score for prostate segmentation.